Saturday, January 21, 2012

"Place" . . . Recent Paintings by Catherine Freshley

"Willapa Bay Mudflats"

(Washington Coast)

30" x 40"

"Ross Island and Mt. Hood"﻿ (Willamette Valley, Oregon)

﻿36" x 60"

"Butte -- Columbia River Gorge"﻿

24" x 48"

Our daughter, Catherine, has been painting like crazy and seems to have a ready pipeline of folks who would like a painting of a place that is special to them. Place -- i.e., those places that have shaped who we are and that continue to pull us back to them after we have left -- is a theme that Catherine has explored for several years in her writing and art. When she moved to Eastern Washington state, someone suggested that she concentrate on painting local landscapes of the Columbia Basin steppe, since the folks in the vicinity would likely be more interested in them than in paintings of the coastal area that has been so important to our family. Of course, this makes perfect sense from a statistical standpoint. Yet in the year that she's been there, Catherine has encountered people who have instantly recognized the rather anonymous scenes of her assorted paintings of Willapa Bay, and have recounted fond memories of having spent a great deal of time in their childhood actively engaged with the endlessly changing coastal estuary that is impacted by the ebb and flow of the tide.

Isn't it wonderful that mere pigments, when suspended in binders and transferred to a surface via a process of acute observation and carefully considered brush strokes, can instantly bring forth a multitude of memories and an infinite range of emotions?

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